Electricity consumption rising?

[AE-NMidlands]

I have been musing...
A few weeks ago there was a news report that despite decarbonisation (world?) consumption was rising. My reaction was "Good, it means that the developing world is starting to catch up with us, hopefully with pv on all their schools and medical centres etc." I imagine that their increase in consumption is outweighing our reduction - although as we transition further away from fossil fuels, especially gas, I guess ours will rise again too, if it isn't already.

My 2-year moving average log of kWhr for both gas and electricity has fallen steadily over the last 5 years, by 20% and 10% respectively, as we progressively replaced the old windows, dry lined the walls and changed out wasteful electric bulbs and appliances. I guess we have been helped to some extent by global warming, but against that post-Covid we have not had the holidays we used to, so that is 10 days each winter when we haven't been away leaving the house on a frost-stat and not heating a kettle each night for a hot water bottle!

Now, I can see that as we get older we are using more lighting and keeping ourselves a bit warmer, so that will be offsetting our reductions... and with pv and biggish battery being installed very soon I expect our electricity consumption to start to ramp up as we transfer heating loads to self-generated power and Octopus flux imports. Hopefully our draw from the grid will only be a smallish bit in winter (but maybe more than now though,) to be offset by big exports all through the summer.
Is this a reasonable assessment of the situation, or am I missing something?
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[Joeboy]

We mirror your experience We have seen massive falls in combined kWh fuel use since we started actively tracking in 2016.

We have also seen a rise in electricity in the last couple of years but large benefits in the gas & diesel side of things.

We are doing around 12,000 miles pa in the EV and a couple of thousand at best in the diesel van. Van used to be over 10,000 miles pa. Gas is thankfully still at zero.

The other part that is harder to quantify for benefit is knowledge and how we act on it. Often subconscious I'm sure.

So yes, definitely a rise in electricity use which makes the Ripple investments all the more important to offset diesel, aviation fuel for flights and woodburning. I try not sweat.it too much and do what I can.

Our combined grid fuel purchase for 2023 was 15,000kWh plus maybe 500kWh wild EV charging.

That is down from something like 40,000kWh combined fuel and 500 gallons of petrol back in the day. Makes me want to puke tbh.

This year I'm hoping to see about 13,000kWh grid electricity, 300kWh wild EV charging & 30 gallons of diesel with no gas purchased.

[Mart]

I think that's an excellent assessment.

We have seen the same, in fact our leccy consumption was falling steadily, but with the addition of the A2A units and the BEV's, it's now much higher. However our total energy consumption, including GCH and petrol, has fallen. Also the gross energy we are responsible for will have fallen even further thanks to the energy bonus' from heatpumps, and EV's, v's FF options.

I may be wrong, but going back sometime, I think the estimates for leccy consumption were for it to rise by 100%-150%, but our total gross energy consumption, should fall about 60%. Not sure what a current estimate would be, and if that has changed, but I assume we are already starting to see the impact, with gains from heatpumps v's GCH (and oil heating), BEV's v's ICEV's, and RE leccy v's coal and gas generation.

[nowty]

Back in 2010 our grid import were,
28,000 kWh gas
5,000 kWh leccy
10,000 miles across two ICE vehicles = 11,000 kWh
Total 44,000 kWh

Now our grid import which includes two EVs.
300 kWh gas
10,000 kWh leccy
Out of house EV charging 500 kWh
Total less than 11,000 kWh

So its now a quarter of the grid import, even if I include our solar PV self use its now less than half of total energy use compared with 2010.

[Adokforme]

On a similar theme:-
2017 Consumption
Gas 8074 kWh
Leccy 2404 kWh
8500 miles, 2 x ICE vehicles = 9350 kWh
Total 19828 kWh

2023 Consumption
Gas 0 kWh
Leccy 11616 kWh (Including 2 x EV's 10270 miles)
Off site charging 300 kWh.
CoCharger 500 kWh. (Neighbour)
Total = 11416 kWh. (circa 57% of 2017)

Figures include self consumed PV.

[AlBargey]

I'm sure it's been discussed on here before, but it looks like it could be a fallacy to think the change from fossil fuels to renewable and direct electric use will mean we'll use loads more electricity, and taking into account future V2G, V2L and homeowner battery storage and renewables, maybe it won't be too bad!?

Article here:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com ... ity-demand

[AE-NMidlands]

... but I'm not planning any (personal) electric transport at all and it's flat enough around here that my current bike is a dream to pedal, (but my son says it's just that at last I have a relatively up-to-date bike. (http://citycyclingedinburgh.info/bbpres ... p?id=15652 I see that one comment on the link says "For the price I think it's pretty good, but I've had a life of riding about on pretty mediocre bikes so I'm probably not the best judge of these kind of things." That could have been me, but it wasn't!)

2000 miles a year means it is not worth superseding our perfectly serviceable ICE car, my goal is to reduce our 45kWhr a day of household gas consumption as quickly and as far as I can sensibly manage.
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